During President Clinton's first term, former Rep. Bob Dornan (R-CA) was the worst of the worst among the scandalmongers. He routinely said things like this on the House floor (9/26/96):
There are all sorts of ricochets flying around, like the center of the new book by Roger Morris called `Partners In Power.' In the middle it has a brother who went to prison for cocaine under a cocaine pusher named Lassiter who got pardoned, saying my brother has a nose like a shovel. Guess of whom he was speaking, Mr. Speaker?
Rule XVIII prohibits me from telling the million or so people in our audience. Use your imagination. Who has a shovel for a nose in Federal Government today?
So it was almost painfully ironic to read Dornan simultaneously bemoaning the difficulty of protecting one's reputation from scurrilous attacks (10/8/94):
Mr. Speaker, it has often been said, and rightly so, that if a man loses his good name he loses everything. And with the advent of attack-dog journalism it has become harder and harder for those of us in public office to defend our good names and reputations. When accusations are made they are front page news. When those accusations turn out to be false, the corrections -- if you get one, that is -- will be tucked away deep in the bowels of some obscure section that nobody reads. As former Secretary of Labor Ray Donovan said after being acquitted on bogus charges, "Where do I go to get my good name back?"
Cry me a river. Thankfully, Dornan has been consigned to the dust-heap of history, having lost his re-election campaign to Loretta Sanchez in 1996, a 1998 rematch against Sanchez, and a 2004 primary campaign against Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA).
Good for you, Brendan, in not feeling the need for any current news hook or, indeed, relevance, to rehash the 1994 and 1996 comments of an addled Congressman who is now, as you say, on the dustbin of history. What's next, an indignant refutation of Joe McCarthy and Theodore Bilbo or a provocative condemnation of Joe Stalin and Pol Pot?
Posted by: Rob | March 01, 2007 at 02:14 PM